Boy Praised for Saving His Mother in an Attack

As the Father’s Day barbecues wound down amid the fall of night on Sunday, an 11-year-old boy burst from a two-story white home in South Jamaica, Queens, screaming frantically for help.

“He’s going to kill my mother!” the boy, Jacob Rodriguez, called out from his yard.

That Jacob’s mother did not die can be credited to his cries for help, and to the quick response of an off-duty police officer, Joseph Koch, who heeded those pleas.

On Monday, Jacob and others recounted the chain of events that turned on a fierce struggle for the officer’s gun. When it was over, Officer Koch had a gunshot wound to his left hand; the man accused of being the assailant, Jose Bernazard, had been shot three times; and the boy’s mother, Christina Rodriguez, was recuperating from a savage beating.

There was much talk of heroism, some naturally directed at Officer Koch.

“If nobody would’ve helped her, she would have died,” said Virgen Lopez, a niece of Ms. Rodriguez’s who visited her at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. “He was bashing her head.”

Daisy Velasquez, 53, the boy’s aunt, said Ms. Rodriguez told her at the hospital that the attack began just after she had returned from church about 9 p.m. Police officials said a man arrived, began pounding on the door and eventually broke it in.

Jacob moved to shield his mother, she told Ms. Velasquez. “He was holding his mother so the man could not hit her,” Ms. Velasquez said. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly called the boy “very brave” for trying to intervene.

After the man struck Jacob, the boy ran from the house and began to scream for help, relatives said. Several doors down, Officer Koch was heading to his car after a get-together with his fiancée’s family and heard Jacob’s screams.

On Monday, the boy recalled seeing the officer, whom he knew from the neighborhood.

“I never knew he was a cop until he saved us,” Jacob said.

The officer drew his gun, a Glock 26; vaulted over a chain-link fence in the yard; and approached the home. There, the police and witnesses said on Monday, he confronted a man who had been stalking the boy’s 33-year-old mother for months.

One of the bullets pierced the officer’s left hand, shattering bones and requiring multiple operations, Commissioner Kelly said on Monday. All three hit Mr. Bernazard, he said: in the lower abdomen, the neck and the hand.

Mr. Bernazard, 40, who was taken to Jamaica Hospital and expected to survive his wounds, was charged by the police on Monday with five counts of assault as well as harassment, burglary and endangering the welfare of a child.

It was unclear if Ms. Rodriguez had been romantically involved with Mr. Bernazard — who once rented a room in her home, Ms. Velasquez said — but relatives and neighbors said he had become obsessed with her.

The police said that Mr. Bernazard had been previously arrested on charges of assaulting Ms. Rodriguez, and that she had at one point taken out a restraining order on him.

At the hospital shortly after the chaotic shooting, Jacob visited Officer Koch at his bedside.

“Thanks for everything; you saved my life,” Jacob said he told the wounded officer. “He was like, ‘Anytime.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2013, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Boy Praised For Saving His Mother In an Attack. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe